Bluetooth® wireless technology is set to revolutionize personal connectivity by providing freedom from wired connections. Bluetooth® is a specification for a small form-factor, low-cost radio solution providing links between mobile computers, mobile phones and other portable and handheld devices.
Bluetooth® wireless technology is an international, open standard for allowing intelligent devices to communicate with each other through wireless, short-range communications. This technology allows any sort of Bluetooth® compliant device—from computers and cell phones to keyboards and headphones—to make its own connections, without wires, cables or any direct action from a user. Bluetooth® is currently incorporated into numerous commercial products including laptops, PDAs, cell phones, and printers, with more products coming out every day.
The Bluetooth® specification defines protocols and profiles to build wireless audio streaming devices such as wireless headphones. These specifications are designed to accommodate the use of content protection mechanisms such that the audio content is encrypted when transferred between the two devices.
Content protection is optional and the Bluetooth® specifications give little guidance on how it should be used. Therefore it is likely that there will be products that do not use content protection while others do. This presents an interoperability dilemma: what to do if one device uses content protection and the other does not? Simply not allowing the connection may be too strict and may not be acceptable to users. However allowing the connection would completely circumvent the content protection.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the arts through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.